The website for the Columbia Law Review was taken down Monday by its board of directors after editors published a lengthy article by a Palestinian human rights lawyer accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
The journal’s student editors say the board—which consists of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school—had pressured them to delay publication of the piece. When the editors decided to publish anyway, the site was shut down.
As of early Wednesday, the homepage for the site only displays a message saying: “Website is under maintenance.”
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The article at the center of the row, titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” was written by Harvard doctoral candidate Rabea Eghbariah. It accuses Israel of “crimes against humanity” and says Palestinians are being subjected to a “brutally sophisticated structure of oppression,” arguing for the need for a new legal framework to “encapsulate the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine and derive a legal formulation of the Palestinian condition.”
Eghbariah had submitted an earlier version of the article to the Harvard Law Review which the publication ultimately chose not to publish after an emergency meeting of editors, according to The Intercept.
According to the Associated Press, the board sent a letter to editors Tuesday expressing concerns that the article hadn’t gone through the “usual processes of review or selection for articles at the Law Review, and in particular that a number of student editors had been unaware of its existence.”
“In order to preserve the status quo and provide student editors some window of opportunity to review the piece, as well as provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we temporarily suspended the website,” the letter added.
People involved in soliciting and editing the article told the AP they had adhered to a rigorous review process. They also acknowledged that they did not upload the draft of the article to a server visible to the journal’s wider membership and some administrators amid fears that it would leak or cause a similar controversy to that at the Harvard Law Review.
The essay wasn’t shared with the full staff of the Columbia Law Review until Sunday, though editorial staffers said the move was not atypical. One articles editor at the journal told the AP they have “never circulated a particular article in advance.”
The board’s letter nevertheless said student editors who hadn’t worked on the article should have been given the chance to review the piece and express any concerns. “Whatever your views of this piece, it will clearly be controversial and potentially have an impact on all associated with the Review.”
Some involved in publishing the piece said they had heard from a small contingent of students over the weekend who raised concerns about how the article’s publication could affect their careers and safety.
One of the editors who worked on the piece, Erika Lopez, said it was “completely false to imply that we didn’t follow the standard process.” She also commented on how the article had been widely read after student editors uploaded it to a publicly accessible site following the journal’s own website being suspended Monday.
“It’s really ironic that this piece probably got more attention than anything we normally published even after they nuked the website,” she told AP.
